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Thursday, October 29, 2009

Progress

The book is filling up nicely and my fridge is stocked up with lots of yummy ingredients to make the desserts. The first dessert I intend to make is poached pears. I have bought a selection of pears to test which ones hold up better to the recipe. The choice is between red, bartlett and bosc. Pears poached in dessert wine or sugar water sweetens them up nicely and with a few spices added it makes a a nice warm dessert and is best served with vanilla ice-cream. You can pretty much add any spices and use any liquid to poach pears, it all depends on your personal tastes. Some people will add vanilla or honey and others will use red wine to poach pears and serve it with a chocolate sauce. As long as you use the basic principles of the recipe you can make what ever you like. I love the warmth that the spices give, I use cinnamon, cloves and star anise. These flavors remind me of mulled wine that we we usually drink at Christmas. It is such a comforting dessert.

When buying the pears I always make sure that they are firm and have a good shape as I want the dish to look pleasing to the eye. People want to know what their eating and if it looks like a pear, then most probably it is going to taste like a pear. I try to keep the stalk on, again for aesthetic reasons. To be honest I cannot really tolerate eating uncooked pears. I think I have an allergy to the fruit proteins as my mouth gets really itchy. I am the same with cherries and kiwis, but once these fruits are cooked I'm fine. I thought it may be the pesticides, so I tried organic but I still had the same issue. Typical!!!

Ok, so moving onto news about the book. It is looking awesome!! There is still a lot that needs to be done and honestly I don't think it will be ready by Christmas. I would love it to be, but I don't want to rush it and spoil it. The book has evolved so much since my first impressions on how it should look, the chapters remain the same, however some of the layout is different. On each of the chapter pages there are now photos of my favourite dish associated to that chapter and there are a lot more photos through out the book. The reason being that some of the recipe methods took up a couple of pages so the photo of the dish could not be presented on the same page. To remedy this the photos have been displayed within the recipe method, hence more photos. I am so proud of how it is turning out and this is now giving me more motivation to finish it. Once finished I will get Ian to proof read it and make any changes and then its time to publish. Wahooo!!!